Reflections

We are having a conversation; we are playing a game of mirrors -- I am a mirror, and you are a mirror, and we are catching the light in our cupped palms and reflecting fragments of ourselves back at each other. This is why things seem so familiar (this is the game that we all play, all the time, tirelessly, and this is why it's so almost-impossible to ever break through and see what's actually inside; any animal with eyes will let itself be hypnotized by its reflection).

The man who works nights at the tiny neighborhood grocery across the street from my apartment building is moving to Hawaii after Christmas. He is one of those strange and random neighborhood acquaintances, the sort that one ends up with if one spends enough time living in the downtown area of a city, in close proximity with all the other downtown-city people all the time, and the law of averages dictates that at least some of these other strangers must become habitual encounters, and sometimes that one thing can lead to something else. He's a wacky kind of guy; he talks too loudly, always. He's older than he looks but more curmudgeonly than even his actual age might lead one to expect. In passing, he might give the impression of being somewhat rigidly uptight and distant, but in fact he's something of an aging hippie, grew up gay in a repressed Southern childhood, and has been around the world and then some. I've always liked him, and I bring him some of anything I happen to bake, dashing across the street at night with a bowl of warm fruit crumble in my hands, a stack of cookies wrapped in paper towels, a chunk of cake. He took me to dinner -- the second time we've gone out and shared a meal together -- to a tiny Ethiopian place I'd wanted to try but hadn't gone to yet, and we took the unfamiliar bus ride to a part of town we'd never been to, either of us. And the evening smells of autumn, yellow-golden leaves piled thick across the sidewalks, beneath the crowded curbside trees, crunching beneath our shoes, and it's a somewhat lousy part of town, but at dusk, on a cool translucent evening, everything is gentler than it might be, and pristine in its imperfection. The room is tiny, and uncrowded, and the food is beautiful, and cheap, and hot and possibly the best meal out I've had in I don't even know how long, and the glass of honey wine is soft-edged and mellow, like the place or the evening or the situation, or perhaps like everything for just a fleeting moment (gone once you exhale, but almost-real for the intake of breath before). We walk a mile or more, through the now-dark streets, past dark store windows, under trees, until we get to a part of town that has more bus options, and in fact a bus pulls up less than a minute after we reach the bus stop.

I know that things -- the way things are, now -- are not your fault; this means I can't be angry with you (and I'm not sure if being angry would be better or worse than how I feel anyway, or somehow a small relief, or not at all, but it doesn't matter because I can't be, not at you). I can turn the anger that might otherwise be inward, though (and of course, I do, helplessly); I cry for you as hard as I mourn the loss of you (or maybe even more, it's hard to say -- can grief be held in the palm of a hand, measurable and solid?). I want to float in the ocean of your pulse, and remember how it feels to breathe; I want to wrap your pain in something gentler.

When we get to my stop, we both get off the bus, and he walks back to my apartment building with me; I let him come upstairs so I can cut him a big chunk of recently-baked fruit and ginger cake to take home with him, making him promise to ignore the chaotic mess of my apartment while I do so. I hand him the foil-wrapped package, and walk him back down the hall, to the door leading to the back stairs, give him an awkward fleeting hug -- he is not a man given to touch, really, to blatant physical affection (or at least, I've never seen him so inclined, and he does not react to small passing, glancing contact in a way that suggests it is something that comes naturally). He's an odd man, and a very strange, random, and surface-level acquaintance. And I know that I will miss him, in a certain extremely qualified way, when he is gone. I'm glad that I could give him sweets, and listen to him talk too loudly.

What we're doing, all of us, is playing an endless game of mirrors, but it's easy to forget (and easy to never even realize); we're playing a game without clear rules, that never ends. This is why it's so very simple, quickly done, to recognize yourself in the face of a stranger -- or a word, or the tilt of a chin, the whisper of a wrist. (The difference is, I can love a stranger without a second thought; mirrors distort and soften just enough to make it easy.)